Prof. Yigal Levin:
I hope I may be allowed to comment on this question that you posed to
Karl: “What evidence do you have that the Patriarchs wrote at all? Where does
the Bible mention their writing? Why would you expect pastoral nomads to
write? Or slaves, for that matter. If they wrote at all, the Patriarchs would
have written in Canaanite and the Israelite slaves in Egyptian.”
We know from Amarna Letter EA 273 that tent-dwellers in the southeastern
Ayalon Valley, who in my view were the immediate neighbors of the first
Hebrews who were sojourning in the northeast Ayalon Valley at that very time,
used writing. They used writing [almost certainly using a scribe to write
Canaanite words in Akkadian cuneiform] to communicate these tent-dwellers’
displeasure as to the succession, at the death of revered Amorite princeling
Milk-i-Ilu [whose historical name is set forth at Genesis 46: 17, and
whose Patriarchal nickname is “Mamre the Amorite”], of his firstborn son
Yapaxu [the “iniquitous Amorite”, who was hated by tent-dwellers because he
seemed to be planning to drive tent-dwellers out of the Ayalon Valley in Year
14]:
“May the king [pharaoh Akhenaten], my lord, take cognizance of his land,
and may the king, my lord, know that the Apiru [tent-dwellers] wrote to
Ayyaluna [Ayalon] and to Sarxa [Zorah], and the two sons of Milkilu barely
escaped being killed.”
Your statement that “the Patriarchs would have written in Canaanite” is
misleading on two important counts. First, the Patriarchs used a scribe to
write down the Patriarchal narratives. [Based on similarity of styles as
well as geographical proximity, that scribe likely was the former scribe of
IR-Heba of Jerusalem.] Secondly, although the language was “Canaanite”
[which is remarkably close to Biblical Hebrew, by the way, except that all
the endings are different], the writing medium used was Akkadian cuneiform.
No non-cuneiform alphabetical writing system was advanced enough in
south-central Canaan to handle a long, sophisticated composition like the
Patriarchal narratives until well into the 1st millennium BCE.
Indeed, from the dawn of time to 7th century BCE Jerusalem, the only
significant amount of writing, as to letters or anything more substantial than
that, that is historically attested as coming out of south-central Canaan
consists of the Amarna Letters in the mid-14th century BCE. That’s the
o-n-l-y time there were scribes in south-central Canaan who would be more
than
happy to sell their services, even [in hard times] to tent-dwellers like
the first Hebrews.
Prof. Levin, can’t you see that the Patriarchal narratives as a written
text are m-u-c-h older, and m-u-c-h more historically accurate, than is
generally realized by non-religious scholars? When you read Amarna Letter EA
273 above, a w-r-i-t-t-e-n document from south-central Canaan in the
Late Bronze Age, you’re reading about “Mamre the Amorite” [historical
Milk-i-Ilu], and his tentdweller-hating firstborn son Yapaxu, the “iniquitous
Amorite”. T-h-a-t is why all 7 firstborn sons in the Patriarchal narratives
-- Haran, Lot, Ishmael, Esau, Reuben, Er, Manasseh -- are in 7 out of 7
cases portrayed as properly getting the shaft. Anybody as successor ruler in
Year 14 but firstborn son Yapaxu! That’s the Patriarchal narratives in a
nutshell. And it’s all fully verified by the Amarna Letters [and similar
non-biblical sources]. The Patriarchal narratives have p-i-n-p-o-i-n-t
historical accuracy in a Years 12-14 timeframe.
The Patriarchal narratives were n-e-v-e-r an oral tradition. The
confusion of gutturals in the exotic non-Hebrew proper names in the text,
together
with the otherwise letter-for-letter accurate spelling of those ancient
non-Hebrew proper names, are the telltale hallmarks of a Late Bronze Age
composition that was written down in Akkadian cuneiform at the end of the
Amarna Age.
Prof. Levin, Amarna Letter EA 273 was written in the s-a-m-e year (Year
14) as the year in which the Patriarchal narratives were composed, being
just four years before the Patriarchal narratives were recorded in Akkadian
cuneiform using Canaanite/pre-Hebrew/Hebrew words. The situation described
in Amarna Letter EA 273 is i-d-e-n-t-i-c-a-l to what is being described
throughout the Patriarchal narratives: the s-a-m-e geographical location
[the eastern Ayalon Valley] and the s-a-m-e year [Year 14] and the s-a-m-e
succession of leaders [first the fine Amorite princeling Milk-i-Ilu, then
his firstborn son -- the iniquitous Amorite, being tentdweller-hating
Yapaxu] and the s-a-m-e historical concern: that tent-dwellers like the
first Hebrews might soon be driven out of their homeland in the eastern Ayalon
Valley in Year 14 by the new princeling ruler Yapaxu. S-a-m-e . It’s all
the same, and it’s all fully verified historically. You see, it was all
written down in the Patriarchal narratives, from the very beginning, using
Akkadian cuneiform to write pre-Hebrew words.
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois
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